The was an improvement on the
Macintosh IIcx . Sharing the same compact case design with three expansion slots, the IIci improved upon the IIcx's 16
MHz Motorola 68030 CPU and
68882 FPU , replacing them with 25 MHz versions of these chips. The IIci had a 70 megabyte hard disk.
The IIci was the first Macintosh to feature
32-bit Clean ROMs , an optional Level 2
Cache , and — a first for a non-all-in-one Mac — onboard graphics for an external display. Because the built-in graphics used the system's RAM for its
VRAM , some users used a
NuBus graphics card to reclaim the lost memory. For a short time in 1989, before the introduction of the 40 MHz
Macintosh IIfx , the IIci was the fastest Mac available. It was also one of the most popular Macs of all time.
